Pastel color palettes

Six soft schemes, five colors each, every hex copyable. Ordered dark to light so the structure is visible.

A pastel is a hue at low saturation and high lightness, and the whole difficulty of the style is that this definition leaves no room for contrast. Five true pastels side by side is a scheme with no hierarchy at all - pretty as a swatch row, unusable as an interface. Every palette below therefore breaks the rule once, with a muted mid-tone or a soft charcoal doing the job that a pastel cannot.

  • Powder

  • Sorbet

  • Sea glass

  • Cotton

  • Macaron

  • Nursery

If you take one thing from this page: pastels are grounds, not ink. Almost no true pastel reaches 4.5:1 against white, and most sit under 2:1, so body text in a pastel is not a style choice, it is a page nobody can read. Set your text in the darkest color in the row - or in a near-black that borrows a little of the palette's hue, which keeps the softness without the failure. This is also why pastel schemes tend to look better with generous whitespace than with large flat fills: the airiness is doing the work the contrast cannot.

Other palettes.

Same format, different mood. Every hex on every one of them copies in a click.

All thirteen palette collections · Pull a palette out of an image · Check a pair for contrast

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